kougademocrat

Residents in certain parts of Wavecrest do not have have water this morning due to a pipe that burst in the early hours of this morning.

The Kouga Municipality has been working on fixing the pipe since 5 am but cannot give a time line as to how long it will take to fix the problem.

The water infrastructure of Wavecrest is in serious need of upgrading as burst pipes seem to be norm nowadays.

Dirty water supplied from the bore holes has caused many loads of washing to be ruined and there does not seem to be a solution to this problem either.

Over the years the residents in upper Wavecrest have complained of the poor quality water supplied from the Jeffreys Bay Water Works.

DA Councillor Dave Aldendorff brings us the facts:

In June 2007 Ninham Shand Consulting Services were asked to investigate the situation and submitted a comprehensive report detailing how to improve the quality of the water and upgrade the capacity of the existing water treatment works.

They identified the cause of the problems and the municipality was given three options to sort these out, the cost of which ranged from R 5 150 000 to R 22 000 000 depending on the flow of treated water required.

Due to lack of finances nothing further was done regarding treatment or the flow of water from the Water Works until November 2012 when Dr MC Steynberg visited the site and submitted his report on the “ Manganese and related water quality problems in Wavecrest, Jeffreys Bay.” Other than some minor changes at the Water Works the situation has remained the same.

During December 2013 the water was unacceptably discoloured due to the inability of the Water Works to handle additional demand during the holiday season, and most times water was fed directly into the system without proper filtration, and supplemented with water from the Churchill dam escalating the dirty water problem.

There was also a drop in water pressure and some areas were without water for certain times.

The visitors have left but the situation remains the same. Currently there are eight boreholes of which only five are functional and, due to current demand, the amount of water being pumped from the boreholes is insufficient to keep the reservoir at optimum levels, so additional water from the Churchill dam continues to be fed into the system.

As a result there is no time for the oxidation period to remove the manganese and other metals from the system resulting in the discolouration, and damage to clothing.